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October 02, 2014

(++++) THE DIFFICULTIES OF RELATIONSHIP

Ivan: The Remarkable True Story
of the Shopping Mall Gorilla. By Katherine Applegate. Illustrated by G.
Brian Karas. Clarion. $17.99.

The evolutionary closeness
of apes and monkeys to humans makes for considerable difficulty in our dealings
with them, not only in the real world but also in the world of books – fiction
and nonfiction alike. Not so long ago, in the early 1960s, the obvious
intelligence and clear responsiveness to humans of apes and monkeys made them
favored attractions – not only in zoos and circuses but also in commercial
establishments, including the shopping mall in Tacoma, Washington, to which the
gorilla named Ivan was brought to help draw customers to a place called the
B&I Circus Store. In reading about Ivan, it is very important not to impose
the standards of our own time on earlier ones, even if we believe ourselves
morally superior now – or at least better informed. The fact is that there was
nothing particularly unusual at the time of Ivan’s capture in Africa and his
transport to the United States as a shopping-mall attraction: we knew far less
50 years ago about gorillas and other great apes than we do today. In fact,
Ivan’s captivity and his eventual release to Zoo Atlanta for the final 18 years
of his life were part of the overall story of humans learning more about better
and worse ways to interact with our distant cousins. Katherine Applegate, who
already wrote a novel called The One and
Only Ivan, now tells the gorilla’s story in a sensitive picture book whose
G. Brian Karas illustrations are clearly designed to evoke every possible bit
of sympathy for Ivan: he is shown smiling happily when first born, bewildered
as a faceless man approaches him with a net, and frowning worriedly after he is
caught and put in a box – all very anthropomorphic expressions that a real-life
gorilla would not have, although the underlying emotions may very well be analogous
to ones that Ivan experienced. Most of Applegate’s book emphasizes how unhappy
Ivan was, although she stops short of directly blaming those who used him for
commercial purposes, focusing young readers instead on the power that people
have to make things better: “People began to grow angry about Ivan’s lonely
life. Children and adults wrote letters, and signed petitions, and held
protests.” The book becomes a celebration of Ivan’s release into the Atlanta Zoo
– still a form of captivity, but a more-benign one than a shopping-mall cage –
and his apparently happy life there (Karas shows him with a contented
half-smile). Back-of-the-book pages explain more about Ivan’s life, again in
minimally judgmental terms, and provide Web sites to which readers can go to
learn more. The result is a sensitive and well-meaning book that, however,
raises (on its periphery) some difficult-to-answer questions. For example, Ivan
lived to be 50 years old (he died in 2012) – while gorillas in the wild live
only into their 30s, and not always even that long. So was Ivan’s longer life among
humans an unalloyed evil, or was there a tradeoff of some sort in which his
admittedly heartless capture brought him more years (eventually in a place of
peace, with other gorillas around him) than he would otherwise have had?
Questions like this are ones that parents would do well to explore with
sensitive and thoughtful children, especially those who read Ivan: The Remarkable True Story of the
Shopping Mall Gorilla and wonder how anyone could possibly put Ivan on display
at a mall. No one could or would do that now, at least in the industrialized
world, but books like this can be openings to a study of the past and of our
increased understanding of animals – if that is the role we want a book like
Applegate’s to fill.

The difficulties of deciding
on how we want to interact with apes and monkeys become clear and are
accentuated with a look at the wholly fictional, wholly enjoyable and wholly
unrealistic 25th-anniversary edition of Eileen Christelow’s Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed.
Christelow offers a highly amusing retelling and illustration of the
traditional song about five little monkeys jumping until one falls off and
hurts his head; the remaining four little monkeys jumping until another falls
off; and so on. The pictures of the increasingly distraught mother monkey and
ever-more-frustrated doctor monkey who is ignored when he repeatedly says “no
more monkeys jumping on the bed!” are wonderful. And Christelow’s final page,
showing the monkeys’ mama jumping on her
bed, makes a delightful ending. Furthermore, the new Deluxe Edition of this 1989 book offers a very nice “how to draw a
monkey” bonus, plus a free audio download. But how are families “supposed” to
react to the book? It is intended purely as fun; nobody thinks the pajama-clad
monkeys are real-world animals; the expressions in Karas’ drawings of Ivan may
be anthropomorphic, but in Christelow’s book the entire story treats the little
monkeys as if they are human children; and what does all this say about us,
that we continue to find monkeys and their adorable-to-human antics a matter of
fun, a matter to exaggerate in kids’ books that may create expectations of how
real-world monkeys behave and how they can and should be treated? It is not
necessary to be a typically humorless, self-important animal Puritan of the
PETA variety to wonder about ways in which the juxtaposition of stories like
Christelow’s and Applegate’s may affect the young children for whom the books
are intended. Five Little Monkeys Jumping
on the Bed is written purely for enjoyment, but there is a question about
just how pure fun can be – even for children – at a time when so many people
take so many issues, including the treatment of animals, so very, very
seriously. Hopefully families can discuss the difference between a book like
Christelow’s and one like Applegate’s, and hopefully there will always be room
in our homes for amusements with animal characters – yes, including ape and
monkey characters. Hopefully, too, children will be better than adults have
sometimes shown themselves to be at making a distinction between the hijinks of
fictional monkeys and apes and the real-world needs of the animals on whom the
caricatures are loosely based.